A consortium known as Data Over Cable Service Interface System (DOCSIS) has promulgated the DOCSIS standard for cable systems since the mid-1990's. A vendor that wanted to provide cable modems (CMs) or cable modem termination systems (CMTS's) would first have to get their designs certified through the DOCSIS consortium, whereupon they could sell to the multiple system operators (MSOs) or their customers. The resulting efficiency and cost savings combined with the already extensive and massive reach of the MSOs' networks made DOCSIS CMs the dominant way for U.S. users to access the Internet.
As technology has continued to evolve since the inception of DOCSIS, DOCSIS itself has evolved in turn such that various enhancements have been standardized. For example, DOCSIS 1.0 evolved to DOCSIS 1.1, then DOCSIS 2.0, and finally DOCSIS 3.0. But all these more modern flavors of DOCSIS maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions. Thus, DOCSIS has continued to dominant the market for broadband access despite the evolution of telecommunication alternatives such as DSL.
Each DOCSIS version specifies the protocol used for management of the network elements. Part of this management includes provisioning each cable modem with a configuration file. Each cable modem (CM) is configured to acquire its configuration file subsequent to power-up. In this manner, an MSO can monitor and control the way a CM accesses the network. But consider the aftermath of a extensive power failure: it is common that power is suddenly re-supplied to entire neighborhoods or even large cities such that a large number of CMs are simultaneously powered-up and thus request for their configuration file. A server in the DOCSIS management system that provides the configuration files responsive to these requests thus becomes overburdened and crashes, whereupon it may take several more hours to finally re-provision all the cable modems. This delay will not just occur for a cable network: should a passive optical network (PON) be managed using DOCSIS management tools, the same delay will be incurred upon mass startup of the CM analogs (optical network units).
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an accelerated DOCSIS re-provisioning of configuration files that will not suffer the bottlenecks and delay encountered in conventional DOCSIS systems subsequent to power failure re-boots.